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Last week I looked at the three “P’s” of human color perception– physical, physiological and psychological– as a way to help define a color gamut for the ideal display. Based on real world examples from art and commerce, I concluded that the range of colors found in nature, as measured by Pointer, provided the best fit with our two design goals which were an accurate and exciting, immersive experience.

This week, I’d like to get a little more practical and take a look at existing color gamut standards to see what we might realistically be able to achieve today.

What fits best?

Color gamut of 4,000 surface colors found in nature as measured by Pointer in 1980 against the color gamut of the iPhone 5.

The first thing you’ll notice about Pointer’s gamut (pictured above again) is that it’s a pretty odd, squiggly shape. This means it is going to be difficult to cover efficiently with a three primary system that mixes just red, green and blue to create all the colors we see, like the LCD found in the iPhone. In order to cover Pointer’s with just those three colors, we’d need to make them extremely saturated. There are proposed standards that take this approach, such as rec.2020, but since they are not practical to implement today from a technology standpoint I’ve decided to ignore them for this discussion.

For the near future, we’ll need to rely on just three colors to get the job done, so what can we do now? Let’s look at two popular wide color gamut standards: Adobe 1998 and DCI-P3:

Current wide color gamut standards Adobe RGB 1998, commonly used by pro photographers and designers, and DCI-P3, used in digital cinema, compared to Pointer’s gamut in CIE 1976

Let’s start with Adobe 1998. Many people are familiar with this color gamut since it is found as an option on many consumer cameras and it is popular among creative professionals. It certainly covers a significantly wider range of colors than the HDTV broadcast standard with a very deep green point. The rich cyans that we talked about in the movie “The Ring” would look great in Adobe 1998. But, we’re not getting any more of those exciting reds and oranges. In fact, Adobe’s red point is identical to the HDTV broadcast standard.

What about DCI-P3 then? Designed to match the color gamut of color film and used in cinemas all over the world, DCI-P3 has a very wide gamut. The reds are particularly deep and, of course, all of the colors from the movies we looked at are covered. Still, it’s missing a lot of the deep greens found in Adobe 1998 and only just fits the green Pantone color of the year. So DCI-P3 is not quite perfect either.

What about a hybrid, custom gamut?

What if we combined the green from Adobe with the red from DCI-P3 and their shared blue point? We’d end up with pretty good, high 90’s percentage coverage of Pointer’s gamut, coverage of all of the existing HDTV broadcast content, full coverage of cinema content from Hollywood and a superior ecommerce experience with most of the colors from the natural world covered.

Hybrid color gamut standard that combines the green point from Adobe 1998 with the deep red of DCI-P3

Looks pretty great and we can make displays now that cover this color gamut with today’s technology. But how would it work on the content side? Would we need to get together and agree on this new standard and then wait for years while it is slowly adopted by content creators and display makers?

Next week

Next week we’ll look at how content delivery might evolve to support gamuts like this without the need for major changes to broadcast standards.

Last week I set out to define the ultimate consumer display experience in terms of color performance. I laid out some potential color performance design goals for an ideal display, suggesting that such a display should be both accurate and capable of creating an exciting, immersive experience that jumps off the shelf at retail.

Can we achieve both goals? To find out, let’s start by looking at how we perceive color.

Color Perception

The color of objects that our eyes see in nature is determined by three things: physical, physiological and psychological:

The color of objects that our eyes see in nature is determined by three things: physical, physiological and psychological.

The physical component of our color perception is a constant based on the laws of nature. It is a combination of the quality of the illumination or light source, in this case meaning spectrum it contains, and the reflectance of the object. In the image above, the ball appears red to the eye because it is reflecting red light, while absorbing most the other colors from the light source.

The physiological part of our vision is also a relative constant that is based on the electrochemical processes of the eye. The back of the retina contains photoreceptor nerve cells which transform incoming light into electrical impulses. These electrical impulses are sent to the optic nerve of the eye and onto the brain, which processes and creates the image we see. And that’s where the psychological component comes in.

Let’s look at how each of these components might affect display color performance, starting with the physical, which ought to be something we can measure.

Physical

Fortunately, a guy named Pointer has done this for us. For his 1980 publication, Pointer measured over 4,000 samples and was able to define a color gamut of real surface colors, of objects found in nature. The result is commonly called “Pointer’s Gamut:”

Color gamut of over 4,000 colors found in nature as measured by Pointer against the color gamut of the iPhone 5.

This already seems like a great place to start. It immediately looks like a great fit our first ultimate color experience criteria which was accuracy. If we could accurately capture and reproduce all of the colors found in the natural world it would make for a much improved, more accurate ecommerce experience, for example.

But how important are those extra colors? Looking at Pointer’s gamut mapped against the color gamut of the latest iPhone in the chart above, you have to wonder if we really come across these deep cyans and reds in everyday life. Are they just infrequent, rare colors or something worth pursuing for our display?

Turns out we do. As an example, Pantone’s color of the year for 2012 was a deep emerald green that falls outside of both the iPhone’s gamut and the HDTV broadcast standard. This is an important and popular color that appears a bit too yellowish on your computer monitor when you are shopping for the perfect tie on Amazon. So there are some really important colors outside of what the iPhone can display today.

But, what about our second criteria, the lifelike, exciting, immersive experience we want to give consumers? Is the gamut of the natural world enough?

Physiological

If we look at the second component of the visual system, the physiological component, we’ll see that we can actually perceive a much wider range of colors. The cells in the back of retina can actually detect the entire range of the CIE diagram. That’s almost double the range of colors that Pointer found in nature:

Color gamut of the average human eye vs gamut of colors found in nature as measured by Pointer

This is starting to sound like a much more immersive experience. Maybe we ought to pursue the full color capability of the human eye just like the industry has done for high, “retina” resolutions.

It sounds great but it would be a tall order. It would take quite a lot of power, brightness and extra bit depth to even begin to think about covering a color space this large. There certainly would be a high price to pay in terms of design tradeoffs to get there. So are there any truly valuable colors contained in that extra space, similar to the Pantone color in Pointer’s gamut, that would make us want to go for it?

Psychological

This is where the psychological component comes into play.

Seeing is not passive. Our brains add meaning to the light that our eyes detect based on context and experience and memory. We are continuously and actively re-visualizing the light that comes out of our retinas.

This may seem hard to believe but this fun demo created by neuroscientist Beau Lotto does a great job of showing just how much our brains actively interpret and change what we see.

The color of the chips has not changed in the video above, just our perception of the color. What’s happening here is our experience is telling us that the color chip in shadow must actually be a much brighter color than the chip under direct illumination, so our brain is just making the correction for us on the fly.

Artists absolutely play on this psychological element of our perception of color, sometimes using totally unrealistic or hyper real colors to make us feel or experience something new or help tell a story. In fact, one of the most influential art instructors of the 20th century, Josef Albers, once said that, “the purpose of art is not to represent nature but instead to re-present it.”

Monet’s The Poppy Field, near Argenteuil

So, whether it’s Monet using saturated and contrasting colors with equal luminance to trick our brains into seeing poppy flowers sway in an imaginary breeze in a 19th century painting or modern films which sometimes rely on the wider gamut capabilities of color film and digital cinema projection to create uniquely cinematic experiences for audiences.

Movies like “The Ring,” for example, which used a deep cyan cast throughout much of the film to create tension and help tell a scary story. Or Michael Bay’s “Transformers” movies, which use deeply saturated oranges, reds and teal greens to create an exciting, eye-popping palette appropriate for a summer blockbuster sci-fi movie about giant robots:

There’s certainly a place for wild, unexpected colors in art. But, as we go through some of these examples, I think we’ll actually find that there is a huge range of expression possible within the gamut of surface colors that Pointer measured. The full range of gamut detectable by the human eye, while exciting to think about, is not really necessary to deliver both accurate and pleasing (engaging) color to our visual system.

So where does that leave us?

In my next post I’ll look at existing wide color gamut standards and content delivery mechanisms to see both what we can do today and what’s next for wide color gamut displays.

In my last post, which focused on the trend towards ever higher resolutions in smartphone displays, I suggested that color performance might be a more useful area of focus for display makers. That’s because, in terms of color gamut, we are a long way from reproducing the full range of colors that our eyes can detect.

For context, let’s add the color gamut of one of the most popular smartphones on the market, Apple’s iPhone, to the chart from my last post:

The latest iPhone only covers about 1/3 of the range of colors our eyes can detect so we’re a long way from matching the acuity of the best displays on the market in terms of resolution. But, how much color do we really need for a great experience?

As a display technologist and color blogger that’s probably the question I’m most frequently asked. If I’m advocating for more colorful displays, how much more am I after? There’s got to be a reasonable limit right?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the short answer is that it depends on a lot of things. Different applications, from ecommerce to the TV on your living room wall, all require differing amounts of color performance. The environment matters a lot too, if the display will be used outdoors brightness may be a factor. There are slowly evolving broadcast standards and content delivery infrastructure to consider as well. And, of course, technology limitations– what can be achieved today and at what cost?

These are all valid concerns for anyone designing and marketing a new display product but they don’t really answer the bigger question. To me, what we really ought to be asking here is: what would the ultimate consumer experience be in terms of color? To answer that, I think we first need to take a step back, put some the practical stuff aside for the moment, and define what that experience should look and feel like. Once we understand that we can start to put the technological pieces together to achieve it.

What do we want?

So, let’s first ask: what do we want? In a pie in the sky, ideal display, in terms of color performance?

Well, the engineers among us are probably thinking, first and foremost, it has to be accurate and that’s a great place to start. Our displays need to accurately reproduce colors found in nature for increasingly important ecommerce applications, photos we take of our family should look real, not over saturated and professionally created content should be reproduced so that it conveys the artist’s intent without distortion.

But, maybe the marketing folks among us have another criteria in mind and that is a bit more subjective. We want our displays to be immersive and engaging. We want them to jump off the shelf at retail and we want to deliver a unique and exciting experience to our customers.

Can we have both?

To find out, I’ll be taking a look at how we perceive color in my next post.

Adobe recently released a new iPhone app called Kuler that let’s you extract colors from your surroundings using the phone’s camera. It’s a useful tool that allows designers to capture color inspiration wherever they find it and easily incorporate it into their work via color palettes.

The app also highlights a weakness in current display technology: no display on the market today can actually reproduce all the colors we see in the environment around us. So, even if the camera sensor can capture that color you love, you may not be seeing an accurate representation of it on your device.

The iPhone 5’s LCD display is designed to cover the sRGB/rec.709 color gamut standard used for HDTV broadcasts. And, it looks great but compared to the world we see around us, it’s just not quite as rich. If we plot the iPhone 5’s color gamut against the gamut of colors found in nature, the phone comes up short in important reds, greens and cyans:

Color gamut of the iPhone 5’s display compared to the gamut of colors found in nature. The iPhone 5 comes up short in red, green and cyan.

If DisplayWeek 2013 was any indication, color has once again become a hot topic in the display industry. Color gamuts are getting larger and it may not be long before we see a display that can match what our eye sees in nature. Over the course of the next year, we will start to see more wide color gamut-capable devices as OLED continues to expand marketshare and new technologies like quantum dot LCD begin to enter the market in volume.

Just back from a great DisplayWeek in Vancouver. Finally had a chance to recover, go through my notes and process everything I saw at the show. Most of the big story lines will be pretty familiar to anyone who followed last years show: TV’s are still getting bigger, OLED TV is still right around the corner, 4K is starting to ship and mobile displays are getting both sharper and more efficient.

DisplayWeek wasn’t all old news though. In fact, just like CES, this year everyone seemed to be talking about color performance. At the annual Display Industry Awards, honors in several categories went to wide gamut display technologies including the Best In Show and Component of the Year awards. And, on the show floor, major manufacturers like 3M, Samsung and LG dedicated significant booth space to wide color gamut or color management technologies.

3M’s Quantum Dot Enhancement Film (QDEF) demo at DisplayWeek 2013. Bottom display is using quantum dots to achieve a wider color gamut than OLED at higher brightness and lower cost.

3M demoed several wide color gamut LCDs based on the Quantum Dot Enhancement Film (QDEF) technology that they are partnering with Nanosys to manufacture. Ranging from smartphone all the way up to 55″ TVs in size, these devices were all showing a wider color gamut than OLED with an especially deep red. This seems like a lot of color but 3M says that in developing their Perceptual Quality Metric (PQM), a new analysis tool aimed at helping display makers model how different performance characteristics will affect end user experience, they found that color saturation positively affected the perception of quality.

In Samsung’s neighboring booth, I found a series of comparison demos designed to show that wide color gamut displays can be both accurate and pleasing to the eye. Each demo featured a camera feeding a live image of several colored objects to both standard and wide color gamut displays. In each case the wide gamut display was able to more accurately recreate the color of the objects in front of the camera. They also showed off the new color management capability of their flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone that allows the device to accurately display rec.709 content without oversaturation- something the previous generation S3 struggled with.

Samsung demonstrating the value of wide gamut displays by showing some common colors that fall outside the rec.709 broadcast gamut standard in a series of demos at DisplayWeek 2013

Finally, at LG’s booth, we saw a new LCD color filter design that allows them to cover the Adobe RGB color gamut used by photographers and print professionals.

With all of this buzz, it looks like we’ll start to see wide color gamut displays start to move into the mainstream in ever larger screen sizes over the next half of this year and into 2014.

Visceral refers to the gut, rather than the mind. Our brain may try to talk us out of jumping off a cliff, but as soon as we take that first step into the void, our guts take over. We respond with a rush of emotion and we can’t help but scream from terror or euphoria. It’s a purely visceral reaction. […]

So here’s my theory: I believe that introducing visceral elements into an app will take it past the point of just being awesome. It will make your app speak to the subconscious, built-in affinity that humans have for the physical properties I mentioned before.

That’s Rob Foster, co-founder of Mysterious Trousers, defining his theory about the importance of visceral elements in application design. The whole piece is well worth reading, especially if you are interested in design or have ever wondered just why Angry Birds is so unbelievably addictive.

In the quote above Rob is talking about the power of little kinetic events in applications like the bounce you get when scrolling to the bottom of a page on the iPhone or the satisfying little “pop” noise you hear when creating a new task in Clear. His point is well made, getting the details of these visceral elements right can clearly take an app from just useful to a truly engaging and even addictive experience for users.

While Rob’s piece focused on the impact of animation and sound, I wondered how color might factor into visceral application design.

Color choice is not just about beautiful graphics- it can also have a powerful physiological effect on us. We have a measurable response to aggressive colors like red, which may even cause a spike in testosterone levels. In fact, recent studies suggest that that the color of a uniform can affect the outcome of an Olympic wrestling match and onscreen colors can even influence how much you pay for something on eBay.

As mobile display technology improves, with more lifelike color and wider dynamic range, application designers may find that color becomes an even more powerful tool to elicit visceral responses from users.

I’m just wrapping up my visit to CES and it’s been interesting year for display technologies. Amid all the noise about 4K, OLED and 4K-OLED, color performance seems to have quietly worked its way into the conversation. I can’t recall ever having so many relatively technical conversations about color with booth reps from major consumer electronics manufacturers at a CES. It nearly started feeling like a visit to DisplayWeek, that is until I ran into some of the weird, only-at-CES iPhone cases…

I bet we’ll see more color talk next year, especially as 4K content delivery mechanisms and standards begin to mature. In the meantime, these are some of the color-related display stories that caught my eye this week:

Wide gamut content delivery

Sony’s 4K content delivery plans have been one of the most talked about topics here at CES. Less mentioned was Sony’s inclusion of wider color gamut in their standard. Sony reps that I talked to said that both the 1080P Blu-ray disc-based “mastered in 4K” and pure 4K delivery methods would include a wider color gamut. They were not ready to release specifics on gamut size or whether it would meet existing standards like DCI-P3. Still, bringing “expanded color showcasing more of the wide range of rich color contained in the original source” is a move in the right direction for wide gamut.

Color accuracy

Technicolor showed off a color certification program that they hope will incentivize display makers to improve the color accuracy of their panels. Displays that meet or exceed Technicolor’s color specs will get a badge and a copy of partner Portrait Display’s Chroma Tune software, which dynamically controls color gamut to match the application you are using. This means if you open Photoshop on a device with an Adobe RGB 1998 capable display, you’ll get the full, wide gamut. But, if you switch over to watch a YouTube video in your browser, the software will limit the display to rec.709 for the most accurate experience. The advantage was well demonstrated by their e-commerce demo, where a pair of shoes were more accurately depicted on a certified display:

Technicolor’s ecommerce Color Certification demo at CES 2013. The color certified laptop in the middle of the frame more accurately shows the color of the shoes.

Like Sony’s upscaling effort, this kind of technology could help drive wide color gamut adoption by making today’s content compatible with newer displays.

Huge tablets

Panasonic’s 20 inch 4K/sRGB tablet

Several companies at the show introduced devices in a new class- the 20-plus inch tablet. While there were a lot of hokey multi touch gaming demos (are you really going to play poker with 4 smartphones and a 27″ screen instead of a deck of cards?), the content creation stuff Panasonic showed actually made me think the new form factor shows real promise as a professional tool.

Their tablet, which measures 20 inches on the diagonal, features a 4K IPS panel that covers 100% of the sRGB color gamut standard. Having such a a large canvas with high resolution, accurate color and multi-touch could be great for creative pros like photographers and architects.

Pantone recently announced their color of the year for 2013, a deep shade of emerald green that they call “Emerald 17-5641.” It’s a great color but there’s a catch- most displays cannot accurately show it.

Based on data from Pantone’s website, I was able to plot the color in CIE 1931 (xy). As you can see in the chart below, Pantone’s color is well outside the sRGB/rec.709 color gamut standard used by most HDTVs, the new iPad/iPhone and many desktop monitors. These devices will be stuck showing a version of Pantone’s emerald green that’s less saturated and probably a bit more yellow than the real thing.

This is a perfect example of a popular real-world color that falls outside of the sRGB/rec.709 gamut. Unless you have a monitor that’s able to show wider color gamuts, like the DCI-P3 or Adobe RGB standards, you are missing out on a great color.

App developer FiftyThree recently updated one of my favorite creativity apps for iOS, Paper, with an impressive new color-related feature. If you are not familiar with Paper, it’s a sketchbook app capable of making the work of even non-artists like me look gallery worthy with an intuitive and responsive interface.

The new feature, which FiftyThree calls “the biggest leap forward in color controls in the past 40 years,” is a color mixer that allows you to create a wide array of colors within the app just as you would in real life. They say they put a lot of time and effort into making the new mixer feel natural. The Paper color mixer works just like finger painting as a kid, mixing yellow and blue in the Paper app mixer produces green.

The new color mixer, shown at the bottom of this screenshot, lets you mix multiple colors to achieve a much wider palette in the new version of Paper.

This is a great feature that expands the content creation capabilities of an already exceptional app. But, as great as this app is, it’s still limited by the color capability of the device it’s installed on. Even the latest iPad, which can produce 100% of the sRGB color gamut, still only shows about 1/3 of the visible color spectrum.

The experience you will have mixing and creating colors on today’s tablets just will not be nearly as dynamic or visceral as making a physical painting. Not until better, wide color gamut technology is adopted in displays will the digital color experience match the stunning world of color we live in.

Ken Werner of Display Central has a post comparing the benefits of quantum dots to OLEDs in consumer TV applications. Being the authority on quantum dot displays that we are here at Nanosys, Ken contacted us for an analysis. Here is the explanation our Ph.Ds gave Ken:

OLEDs use organometalic compounds to emit light. They typically have a central metal atom surrounded by organic ligands. The decay issues are the same as with typical organic fluorophores. In the excited state these molecules are very reactive to H2O and O2, as well as other small molecules that may be around. Once they react they become a different molecule and they will no longer fluoresce or phosphoresce and give off light. The more blue the light emission, the higher the energy of the excited state, and the more reactive the excited molecule will be. So your blue organic phosphores will have a much shorter lifetime than will red phosphores. The burn-in problem seen in OLED displays, that can be seen after just several weeks of operation with static content, is a manifestation of early blue degradation compared to green and red.

Conventional phosphores like YAG are doped materials. YAG used in white LEDs is actually cerium doped YAG. The cerium atom emits the yellow light and is surrounded by a vast amount of YAG. Quantum dots are similar in that a central core crystalline semiconductor material is used to confine the holes and electrons of the exciton (analogous to the cerium in YAG), and in our material this is surrounded by a thick shell of a different, lattice-matched semiconductor material (analogous to the YAG.) We call this a core-shell Quantum Dot structure. If the lifetime of our materials is less than that of conventional phosphors, it is typically because we have not made a perfectly lattice-matched shell, which may distort the core and cause defects at the core/shell interface that reduces the quantum yield.

The big difference here is that a perfectly made core-shell quantum dot does not have an intrinsic lifetime failure mechanism, whereas the organometallic compounds are intrinsically reactive to their environment, which makes them prone to shorter lifetimes especially at higher energies such as blue.